I don't think I'm what you could call an 'early adopter'. In fact, I have a knack of persisting with old tech when clearly better alternatives exist due to some sort of fear-based inertia. Hmm, fear-based inertia, that's probably been the defining characteristic of my life.
Nevertheless, inertia is resistance to movement not an absence of it and eventually I end up getting swept away, not usually by choice. In the past I have meticulously combed the listing magazines (usually the Radiotimes (pronounced 'raddy-ot-imez', of course, as per Victor Lewis-Smith)) and programmed me recorder to catch everything I want to watch for the week well in advance. Oh, the thrill of getting my first VCR. That was also in the late eighties - funny how often that period is cropping up at the mo. I knew the day was inevitably coming. I asked my Then Girlfriend to record Doctor Who on pristine VHS knowing it wouldn't be too long before I actually had a machine to play them on. My Mam and Dad had steadfastly refused to buy one, having no truck with this unnecessary contrivance in much the same way they had resisted the TV remote control longer than was necessary. When a friend (whom I shall refer to as Baron Moorside) offered his old video for £20 I bit his hand off. Even now I'm getting a slight frisson at the memory of being able to rewatch programmes as much as I wanted. Blimey, it used to be only once, didn't it? Hoping something you liked would be repeated - oh, those summer repeats of Doctor Who. What a treat.
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| This is exactly what it looked like when I went there. Ish. |
Anyway, the next thing you knew me Dad had a big pile of Gardener's World tapes - funny how quickly he came round. The skill of programming the timer. I remember my best friend's Gran used to get around that nonsense by setting off an E240 before we all went out to the Pendlebury Miner's Club for snooker, darts and cheap lager so that she had Prisoner: Cell Block H taped without having to worry what time it came on (and the fact that Cell Block H was further along depending which ITV region you were in. During that brief stay in Leicester I was seeing Central episodes, while at home - due to our house being near the park and needing to point the aerial in the other direction - it was HTV, with post Miner's Club episodes being on Granada). And hovering over the Pause and Record buttons to catch when you thought a good trailer was going to be on - I was still doing that in 2005 when Doctor Who came back.
That was all fine for recording, but then there was all the film and telly stuff you bought on VHS - the tab broken to prevent recording over. They were soon enough replaced with DVDs - instant access, commentaries, extras and all. Like most of this history, it was Doctor Who that nudged me to take up the next innovation. When it moved into HD I invested in a laptop with a Blu Ray drive, eventually inheriting my Mam and Dad's old HD telly (by now they were dedicated technophiles, upgrading their equipment as and when) in order to watch on a larger screen.
I eventually went all digital with me recording, as I have chronicled here and here. In other words, I did what everybody else more or less did with their tellies over the past 20 years. Was there some point to this meandering nonsense?
Yes. I wanted to declare that broadcast television is dead.
I've gone and bought a Now TV box - I thought I couldn't go wrong for a tenner. As well as on demand access to the good Sky stuff (Game of Thrones, Girls, This is Jinsy, Mid Morning Matters, etc, etc) it has a slightly less convoluted interface for iPlayer than my PVR as well as access to 4OD and Demand 5. The Wii that I inherited has You Tube and Netflix on it and so I'm now finding that instead of trying to preplan my viewing, I'm now simply waiting until somebody says something good is on and watching it on demand or on catch up. Films I have on DVD I am calling up on Netflix instead, rather than going through the taxing task of opening a box, switching on a machine and putting a disc in it. With BBC3 moving entirely online and iPlayer about to shift to 30 day catch up I think I will be spending the rest of my TV days in a perpetual lag. Which suits me fine. That said, it's too much of a faff trying to watch On Demand stuff from other countries, so I'm still ordering DVDs from the US and Australia which undermines everything I was saying!
That said, I think there must be something in my unconscious that tries to recreate that feeling of 'see something once, then it's gone' from my youth as I always seem to put off watching stuff until the day before it's about to disappear from the menu. There's two things I've managed to miss that I kept putting off and off, so I guess the moral of this story is you just can't help some people.
I'd worried before that my modest Talk Talk broadband connection wouldn't be able to handle all this, despite their claims of unlimited data. So far, it's worked ok - but I know the day of the cloud crash is coming (I've only just got the hang of Dropbox and iCloud). But like the wobbly switch on my bedside lamp I'm going to keep on using it until it finally packs in.
More soonliest
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